Children's Rights

Though various cases of child sexual abuse caught the public's eye in the United States through the 1990s and early 2000s, the nation was stunned by allegations that involved the Catholic Church. The first awareness of what would later unfold into a huge child abuse scandal came in the early 1990s when Father James Porter was convicted of abusing some one hundred boys and girls in various Catholic parishes around the Boston area stretching back into the 1960s.

Porter was found guilty and the court sentenced him to up to twenty years in prison in December 1993. The case shocked Catholics and others around Boston, and the city's cardinal (a high ranking Catholic Church official), Bernard Law, consoled the public by stating that Porter's abuse was an isolated or single case. Law condemned the news media for its coverage of the scandal, but introduced a new sexual abuse policy for his region anyway to calm his church members.

The Boston scandal quieted down for the next several years until another area Catholic priest, John Geoghan, was investigated for 130 cases of child sexual abuse in 1998. Geoghan was forced out of the priesthood and convicted in January 2002 of child sexual abuse. The court sentenced him to up to ten years in prison. Again Cardinal Law insisted this was simply another unusual case regarding Catholic priests.

After Geoghan's case and conviction, however, many more alleged victims came forward about sexual abuse involving priests. Newspaper inquiries and criminal investigations revealed many more. Secret church documents became public in 2002 and proved the Catholic Church not only had knowledge of sexual abuse by priests but had covered it up.

The documents mentioned numerous priests, hundreds of victims, and how claims were repeatedly ignored by church officials. Some alleged victims, however, had been paid off to keep them quiet while certain priests were transferred to new churches and given brief counseling. The documents showed that even Geoghan had been transferred two times for molesting children before finally being caught by authorities. Another priest, Paul Shanley, had also been transferred to new parishes despite a history of child sexual abuse known to the church.

Massachusetts had no law that required suspected child abuse to be reported to authorities. Some cases of child rape, however, were clearly criminal acts and they too went unreported by church authorities. Documents showed church leaders made no attempt to ever inform law enforcement of these criminal activities. As public disgust grew from one revelation after another, Cardinal Law repeatedly refused to resign from his post. In a rare move in April 2002, the pope summoned all U.S. cardinals to the Vatican in Rome to discuss the sex abuse issue.

By late 2002 some 1,200 Catholic priests in the United States were accused of child sex abuse. Four U.S. bishops

resigned as the scandal went worldwide; other bishops resigned in Argentina, Germany, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, Poland, and elsewhere. Then in December 2002 even more revealing church documents were discovered. These new documents described widespread child sex abuse in the Catholic Church and an equally large cover-up. Not only was Cardinal Law aware of all the abuse, but he actively tried to hide incident after incident of child rape from the public and law enforcement.

The second set of documents finally led to Cardinal Law's resignation on December 13, 2002. The Boston archdiocese was near bankruptcy under the weight of some four hundred claims of sexual abuse. By October 2003 Law's successor, Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley, helped negotiate an $85 million settlement with more than 550 sexual abuse victims. In May 2004 the Boston archdiocese announced the closure of about sixty-five parishes as it continued to deal with the consequences of the abuse scandal.